The Making Of The British Army (54 page)

All this was, so to speak, learned on the job. The resulting structure
would become the model for the army in the Second World War – although after twenty years of gathering dust, since with the disbandment of the whole higher organization of the BEF there was no opportunity periodically to put it through its paces. The experience of command and staffwork at divisional, corps and army level was, however, preserved in the magisterium of the staff college at Camberley, and also that of the Indian Army at Quetta. The young Lieutenant Bernard Montgomery, given up for dead at Ypres, had subsequently learned his staffwork as a brigade major in K1, had seen what meticulous planning could achieve in the attack by Plumer’s 2nd Army at Messines, and as chief of staff of 47th (London) Division in 1918 had experienced the exhilaration of the ‘Hundred Days’. He and others like him in turn became the teachers at the staff colleges, so that the knowledge of how to organize, supply, maintain and train these formations, and above all take them into battle, was not entirely lost when in 1939 the political penny at last dropped and the commitment to continental warfare was again embraced.

But tactical ideas, as opposed to battle procedure, did not advance much during the inter-war years. In fact for the most part, ironically, they regressed: the Hundred Days were soon largely displaced in the collective mind of the army by the previous four years of linear warfare. ‘Lines’, so essential to the daily life of soldiers, became once again a dominating operational concept (and not only with the British), with near-catastrophic results in France and Belgium in 1940, and again in the North African desert. Indeed, linear thinking had not been wholly eradicated by the time of the D-Day landings, nor yet in the advance from Normandy to the Baltic. In fact, for the best part of the four decades which followed the end of the Second World War it was the dominant feature of the plans for the defence of Western Europe.

There were, however, after the First World War some officers determined to develop the embryonic theories of mechanized warfare which Plan 1919 had suggested and whose possibilities the Hundred Days had tantalizingly shown. The War Office, if only perhaps at first out of weariness, allowed them to proceed experimentally. Two men in particular – ‘Boney’ Fuller and Basil Liddell Hart
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– wrote extensively on the
potential of the petrol engine on land and in the air to generate operations of great intensity and free manœuvre, provoking heated debate over what was otherwise in danger of becoming once more a pedestrian army. The politicians’ mantra was ‘never again’ – never again the mass slaughter of a Western Front, and therefore never again a continental commitment. In the Great War, of the eight million men called up almost a million had been killed and two million wounded: ‘never again’ must mean the avoidance of war, not its cleverer prosecution. On the other hand, Fuller, Liddell Hart and theorists like them, in their own revulsion at mass casualties and with no faith in treaties, sought a military alternative in their doctrines of the ‘indirect approach’.

The dominant idea in the minds of many officers, however, had come to be the simple question ‘Is it worth it?’ – an instinctive cost – gain calculus: no longer would they press home attacks at huge loss, ‘at all costs’, for that phrase had frequently seemed to reflect an unwillingness or inability to calculate the costs. Montgomery, for one, was quite clear about this: ‘The frightful casualties appalled me. The so-called “good fighting generals” of the war appeared to me to be those who had a complete disregard for human life. There were of course exceptions and I suppose one was Plumer.’ Montgomery would evolve in his own mind a doctrine that encompassed a higher regard for human life – though not to the exclusion of gaining a truly worthwhile objective. And therein lay the difference between Montgomery and the Great War generals he criticized. Minimizing casualties, as opposed to simply despairing of a big ‘butcher’s bill’, became a defining factor in the mental approach of British officers. It continues to characterize the approach today, together with what is called ‘force protection’, and occasionally appears to stand in contrast to the attitude of US army officers who, while using every technical means available, retain the sense that fighting is an inevitably bloody business.

Alongside the theoretical debates, in practice the Royal Tank Corps (RTC) – it was ‘royalled’ in 1923 – kept alive the flame of armoured warfare when official policy did not acknowledge any likelihood of fighting an enemy that had tanks. In 1927 Milne (CIGS), despite or perhaps because of his view that the Great War had been an aberration, authorized an Experimental Mobile Force consisting of two battalions of the RTC, a regiment of field artillery, another of light artillery, a company of Royal Engineers and a machine-gun battalion, the whole
force to be controlled by radio. Its purpose was to determine the ideal organization of a mechanized division – even if the requirement was still hypothetical. And two regiments of cavalry were unhorsed and equipped with armoured cars – the 11th Hussars and the 12th Lancers, who as the most junior of the regiments remaining unamalgamated after 1922 drew the short straw in the eyes of their fellow cavalrymen. To the surprise of almost everyone, none of the officers resigned; no one seemed to have noticed that in these two particularly exclusive regiments almost every officer had his own motor car, and several had their own aeroplanes.
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When senior officers did agree on the need for tanks, however, they frequently disagreed on what the tanks were needed for – and therefore on their specifications. Most viewed them (as did their American counterparts) as supports for the infantry in an all-arms battle along the lines that had developed in France in 1918. A minority saw tanks as a decisive element in themselves, as in a fleet action at sea. Tank design was not, therefore, very innovative. New models tended to be slowmoving, infantry-paced. They were heavily armoured because at these slow speeds they were vulnerable, and the heavy armour in turn limited their speed. The tank carried only a small gun because its purpose was to overcome infantry opposition, not destroy other tanks. Faster, minimally armed and lightly armoured ‘cruiser’ (or ‘cavalry’) tanks were also developed for reconnaissance; these were in effect little more than armoured cars on tracks, though they could exploit a breakthrough as long as they were not expecting much opposition. Both types would prove ineffective when up against the panzer forces developed in the late 1930s by German armoured warfare theorists who had studied and developed the views of Fuller and Liddell Hart along lines of reasoning that the British army had largely rejected.

For most of the inter-war period armoured warfare remained a hypothetical requirement because of the government policy of ‘limited liability’ for continental warfare. As late as 1936 the army’s annual expenditure on horse feed was £400,000 – nearly four times what it was spending on petrol. When, however, Hitler seized absolute power in 1934, and the following year formed three panzer divisions and
unveiled an embryonic Luftwaffe, the prospect of armoured warfare suddenly looked rather more real. But even then, when the ten-year rule was genuinely abandoned and rearmament begun (the rule had officially been dropped three years earlier, but the defence budget had not increased), no significant extra funding came the army’s way except for anti-aircraft guns for the air defence of the United Kingdom; the RAF and the Royal Navy took priority. Indeed, so starved of cash was the army equipment programme that the domestic arms industry had almost disappeared when at last in 1938 Neville Chamberlain’s government turned to the army’s own rearmament. Fortunately, thanks in no small measure to Milne’s foresight in forming the EMF, there was at least an understanding of the requirements of mechanization, and the cavalry at last began exchanging their horses for armoured cars and light tanks; the petrol engine – on paper at least – became the army’s motive power.
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The army of 1938 was still an army that saw itself in the mirror of the Great War, however. It wore practically the same uniform, the same canvas web equipment, the same steel helmet; and it carried essentially the same Lee – Enfield rifle. It knew what its predecessor in the trenches had endured (indeed, most officers above major, and many senior NCOs, wore Great War medal ribbons), and viewed improvisation in the midst of confusion as par for the course. The same is true, if perhaps less consciously, today. Recruits are taken to the battlefields of the Western Front to give them an idea of what their regimental forebears faced, with the implicit message ‘remember before complaining what those who have worn the same cap badge endured’ – and, of course, the unspoken reminder of duty ‘even unto death’.

Although fascism might not have emerged, and the German army might not have been equipped and trained as it was, had the First
World War not been fought, rendering the comparison futile, there is little doubt that the British army would have been in no condition to fight in 1940 without its experience of 1914–18. Those nations that had remained neutral in the First World War were rapidly defeated in 1939 and 1940, though hard fighting in that war did not of itself guarantee fighting power in the second, as the French and Belgians found to their cost. The First World War had forged a modern army whose foundations remained fundamentally sound even though much of the superstructure had become derelict in the two decades that followed. Not least it gave certain commanders a priceless sense of the reality of war, and the moral authority that comes of the experience of hard fighting. It is unthinkable, for example, that Montgomery could have fought the battle of El Alamein as he did, or the Normandy battles, without – in crude terms – all that came with his DSO for the fighting at Ypres.
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In February 1939 the war minister, Leslie Hore-Belisha (of the eponymous beacons from his time as secretary of state for transport), was at last authorized to instigate planning for a continental field force of four regular and four Territorial divisions. The following month he doubled the size of the TA (which was itself mechanizing apace), and in April – even more to the consternation of many of his cabinet colleagues – introduced conscription, or rather universal military training. But if the BEF of August 1914 had been, in the official historian’s words, ‘the best-trained, best-organized and best-equipped British army that ever went forth to war’, that of September 1939 was in many respects no better found than the army that had sailed to the Crimea. The shortages of equipment were staggering: of the 1,646 heavy infantry tanks required, for example, there were just 60. Elsewhere the improvisation was pure ‘Dad’s Army’. The 13th/18th Royal Hussars had handed over their horses in India and returned to Britain in November to mechanize: all that greeted them was a £10 training grant with which
to set up a driving and maintenance school. Fortunately the local garages of Kent were generous in lending them old engines to study. Their Vickers light tanks did not arrive until June; and when they did they were found to be worn-out ‘demonstration models’, most of which broke down between the railway sidings and the barracks. With Hitler tramping into the Sudetenland, the sight of a trail of broken-down tanks cannot have been inspiring for either the troopers or the onlookers. By September, when he lit the final fuse by marching into Poland, half the regiment’s tanks still had no proper gun mountings, and the gunners had had only three days’ range practice. Only on the day before embarkation for France did the Hussars receive their full complement of transport – bakers’ vans and grocers’ lorries in every conceivable colour. The last evening was spent painting them khaki.

ONCE AGAIN, BELGIAN NEUTRALITY WAS AT THE CENTRE OF EVENTS. IN 1914
it had been a strategic priority; in 1939, however, it was an operational hurdle in the allied defence plan, the Achilles heel indeed of the entire French defensive strategy. Between 1930 and 1935 France had built a modern-day Hadrian’s Wall along the 200 miles of its border with Germany from Luxembourg to Switzerland: the ‘Maginot Line’ (named after the defence minister), a complex of obstacles, linked forts and gun batteries forming a defensive belt in places 15 miles deep. But unlike Hadrian’s Wall, it had an open land flank: the Belgian border. And it was a huge one – as long as the Maginot Line itself.

The reason was a toxic cocktail of parsimony, political cowardice and wishful military thinking, not of course unique to France in that decade (or since). In fairness to the Maginot strategists, the left flank was supposed to rest on the Ardennes, which were thought to be impassable to armoured vehicles (though there is no record of any trial in which tanks became stuck in those wooded hills; the Ardennes were not, after all, the Dolomites), and to be protected beyond this pseudo-obstacle by the strong line of Belgian border forts. But in 1936 the Belgians repudiated the treaty on which the strategy depended and declared neutrality (little wonder that the likes of Liddell Hart put no trust in treaties). The French began hastily to extend the line along the
Franco-Belgian border, but in nothing like the strength or depth of the original line on the eastern border. That original line had absorbed so much of the military budget (a great deal more than predicted) that the post-1935 extension proved beyond the reach of the French public purse, not least because it would have to run through the heavily industrialized Lille–Valenciennes sector, and would encounter a significantly higher water table. Besides, some argued, to do much more might send a signal of no confidence in the Belgians to defend their own territory, and isolate them on the wrong side of the defensive line in the event of invasion. And with the eastern border secured by the Maginot Line, what was the threat through Belgium that could not be dealt with by the mobile elements of the French army?